Monday, August 2, 2010

Using virtualenv with PyPy

Thanks to the work that was recently done on the sys-prefix branch, it is
now possible to use virtualenv with PyPy.

To try it, you need:

a recent version of PyPy: PyPy 1.3 does not contain the necessary logic to
work with virtualenv, so you need a more recent PyPy from subversion
trunk. You can either build it by yourself or download one of our
precompiled nightly builds

a copy of virtualenv-pypy: this is a fork of virtualenv that contains
all the patches needed to work with PyPy, and hopefully will be merged
back at some point. It should be totally compatible with the official
version of virtualenv, so it is safe to use it even to create non-PyPy
environments. If you notice some weird behavior that does not happen with
the standard virtualenv, please let us know.

The directory layout has been redesigned in a way that it is possible to use
virtualenv to install a PyPy both from a precompiled tarball or from an svn
checkout:

Once the environment has been created, you can enter it as usual. Note that
bin/python is now a symlink to bin/pypy.

Enjoy it :-)

Thanks to the work that was recently done on the sys-prefix branch, it is
now possible to use virtualenv with PyPy.

To try it, you need:

a recent version of PyPy: PyPy 1.3 does not contain the necessary logic to
work with virtualenv, so you need a more recent PyPy from subversion
trunk. You can either build it by yourself or download one of our
precompiled nightly builds

a copy of virtualenv-pypy: this is a fork of virtualenv that contains
all the patches needed to work with PyPy, and hopefully will be merged
back at some point. It should be totally compatible with the official
version of virtualenv, so it is safe to use it even to create non-PyPy
environments. If you notice some weird behavior that does not happen with
the standard virtualenv, please let us know.

The directory layout has been redesigned in a way that it is possible to use
virtualenv to install a PyPy both from a precompiled tarball or from an svn
checkout:

11 comments:

I recently made a script called pypyenv for easily installing PyPy in a virtualenv side by side with CPython, sharing site-packages. It will allow one to experiment with PyPy in a working virtualenv without breaking current code.

@Alex: nice. pypyenv is obviously something different that virtualenv-pypy, but it might be useful if someone wants to try PyPy.

However, I don't think that sharing site-packages is a good idea: it works as long as you have only pure python packages, but it stops as soon as you build some C extension, as the .so produced by PyPy are incompatible with CPython

A bit unrelated, but would it be possible to have nightly releases with consistent filenames? Right now, they all include the svn revision number (I assume that's what it is), which makes it difficult to write a script that downloads and installs the latest version.

Specifically, I'm looking to create an Arch pkgbuild, because it takes too damn long to compile on my notebook, and I don't want to use the stable release.